Area of Expertise

            *        Learning in the sciences (particularly physics)

*        Study the following:

o       Problem solving

o       How to develop expertise

o       How do people organize knowledge in memory so that it is useful for retrieval and solving problems

*  How to apply research in the above areas to teach better, or more efficiently, or teach in ways that makes students learn the material at a deeper level

1) Lecturing to students in large classroom settings is not the most effective method of instruction.  Findings that come from studies about how people learn indicate that whenever students are actively engaged in their learning, they learn better and faster.  So, we need to find better ways of getting students to learn material than just lecturing in large classroom settings:

--    In a small class you can address students' needs more effectively

--    In large classes (50+ more students), which are typical of many introductory classes (in science in particular), lecturing is not effective.  Other methods should be employed

                                          Classroom Communications Systems.  It is a version of the audience-polling device of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.”  Students are given questions to work on in groups and then submit answers that get displayed onto a histogram.  The instructor then uses the histogram to direct the direction of the discussion in the class.  The instructor is viewed more as a learning coach rather than a repeater of what is in the textbook.  It has its benefits in the sense that the instructor can shape the instruction to meet the needs of the students…if students get it, then the instructor can move on, and if they don't then he/she needs to back track and figure out what is wrong and deal with it.  Students seem to like it and they seem to get more engaged.

2) Implementation—How do you get instructional techniques and implications of research into practice?  Getting a charismatic instructor is not the answer.  Charisma only goes so far; research evidence in the sciences suggests that students learn about the same amount regardless of who teaches them.  How do you take things that work and scale them up so that other instructors are willing to adopt them—that’s a big problem.

 
Two problems to implementation:

--    To teach at the university level, you never have to take a course on teaching, pedagogy, or cognition (the only exception may be school of education professors).  You become a teacher by getting a Ph.D. in some subject and it is assumed that content expertise is the only thing needed to teach that subject, and nowhere in between are you taught about instruction.  In general, you are never taught about how to apply findings from research and learning to instruction in your discipline.  We are essentially reproducing a failed system of instruction, and not because we don’t turn out good Ph.D.s, but we because we fail at teaching the general mass of students.

--    People who have been teaching for a number of years think that they “have it down,” and feel that if they say it in the right way or make lectures a little more clear then students should “get it,” when, in fact, the issue is students have to be engaged in learning.  Lecturing is really a boring way to go for students. 

Telling people what to do to improve their teaching does not really help, even if they are willing to change.  You may have to have an apprenticeship model where teachers observe or co-teach a subject or class with somebody else. Teachers might be able to adopt a new technique so that it meets their style and their students' needs with this learning model.

So, how do you train perspective Ph.D.s in all fields so that they know something about teaching and learning, and how do you get at the people who are teaching already to adopt new styles?  These are big challenges.

What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied (e.g., activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or entire systems)? 

1)   Books:  How People Learn—has a number of chapters on teaching math, science, and history. 

2)   Physics education research is becoming more accepted in physics departments.  In our department and 10-12 other research departments around the nation, there are physics education research groups with doctoral students who do their dissertation on some aspect of physics education research.  So you have some degree programs that are geared to help people with both the content and the teaching and learning of that content.

What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? Do you have any ideas for overcoming them?

1)   Higher education has been very compartmentalized into departments, groups, and schools.  And often times, those groups look down their noses at the other groups.  For example, it is typical for scientists to look down their noses at schools of education.  We need to break down barriers to solve the complex problems of education.

--    One example where barriers need to be broken is in the training of teachers.  Every science department plays some role in the training of prospective teachers (at the high school level).  So, if you are majoring in biology and you want to become a biology teacher, you take several biology classes.  But, biologists teach those courses.  You would have to go to the school of education to get the pedagogical methods course.  However, based on what we know from the NRC's How People Learn report, the pedagogy and the content need to be taught together to develop "pedagogical content knowledge".  Put a different way, just because I can teach physics well does not mean I could teach biology well. 

So, although it is unlikely, there needs to be cross-disciplinary work 

2) Telling people that they are doing something wrong is really not going to work.

--   One way the physics community was able to get faculty interested in finding effective ways of teaching large lecture courses was by developing a conceptual test in physics and encouraging faculty to administer it at the end of their courses.  After students scored very poorly on the test, a test that most physics instructors considered "trivial" and thereby thought that their students would perform very well in it, the professors started to question what they were actually accomplishing by teaching in large lectures courses with the lecture method.  What was clear was that students were able to solve "standard" problems, but they did not really understand the concepts.  This opened up dialogue across many departments and faculty began to ask “How do I go about teaching in different ways.”

--   Once you have the attention of the faculty, it is important that they are given enough support, so that they are able to implement new techniques.   

What additional questions should we be asking? 

What are the goals and what are we (at this conference) trying to accomplish, and are they modest enough so that you can make some headway?  Trying to reform higher education is a big job. 

Need administrators to be involved, either at the conference or at some point.